JetBlue now has 150 seats on all of its A320s, but 4 flight attendants are still operating the flight. How close is JetBlue to getting FAA approval to operate with only 3 flight attendants instead of 4?

The requirement is what their FAA approved company manuals say. If it says they will use 4 attendants on A320 then thet have to get FAA approval to change their manuals to 3. The FAR's are the MINIMUM requirements required to operate. If an airline says in their ops manual that 10 pilots and 10 attendants are required to operate an A/C in their fleet, the FAA will approve the manual because it meets the minimum. Now the FAA will hold that airline to what their manual says, they cannot all of a sudden decide to change that requirement on their own. they have to go thru the FAA and get their ops manuals reapproved before they can make the change.

Years back the rule required a second F/A per 50 seats. When the RJ's gained popularity, airlines petitioned an amendment to the ruling for the 2nd F/A per 51-101 seats. This rule change cascaded the requirement by 1. Thus 3 F/A are required per 101 - 151.

As Movingtin stated, JBLU was over and above the FAR minimum requirement. This topic surfaced 6 months to a year ago, the tone was as if JBLU was attempting to rewrite the rules. They were not, they were making adjustments to their manuals that take place daily throughout the aviation world..

You're both correct. We are operating with 3 flight attendants on our A320s, and have been doing so since March 2. Now, given that we were undergoing cabin enhancements since the beginning of January, it wasn't uncommon to fly in an A320 with 150 seats and be served by 4 FAs. This was because not all the planes were reconfigured during that period, and since scheduling did not know which planes were configured and which weren't, there was no way to schedule 3 or 4 FAs per A320. So they kept it at 4 until all planes were reconfigured.